Cass ordered for both of them, because she had been ordering for both of them for twenty years and saw no reason that one failed romance, two unrelated marriages, and a long demotion from lovers to friends should cost her the privilege.
“He'll have the patty melt,” she told the waitress, “and a side of whatever's green so he can leave it. And keep his coffee coming, he's going to pretend he slept.”
The diner was the one on the avenue with the laminated menus and the pie in the carousel, the kind of place that survived by being the only thing open, and Cass had texted him at noon — lunch, not a question, an address and a time — because this was the maintenance she performed on him at intervals she alone determined. They had been in the same workshop in their twenties, two years of Tuesday nights and bad wine and worse feedback, and for a stretch of that they had been the thing you become when proximity and ambition and loneliness arrive at the same party, and then they had not been, gracefully, which was the rarest of the exits, and what remained was a friendship that was load-bearing, without any of the rent. She had been the better writer. They both knew it and neither said it. She had published a story collection at thirty-one that two people he respected still talked about, and then she had stopped, cleanly and all at once, and become a high-school English teacher in Yonkers, and married and unmarried a man named Phil, and raised a daughter named June who was fifteen and ferocious, and she had a life with edges and weather in it, a life that pushed back, and Eli had kept writing and had, by way of reward, two novels nobody read and a third that had not moved in fourteen months.
“You've got the look,” she said, when the coffee came. “The one where you're living in a project. You go somewhere when you get like this. The lights are on, nobody's in the lobby.”
“I'm fine. I'm working.”
“Working on the island thing.”
“It's not an island, it's the absence of an island, it's a coordinate error that's —” He stopped, because she was smiling, because she had baited the hook and he had taken it, hook and all, which was the whole reason she set them: to watch him get animated about something, to confirm he was still in there. “It's going,” he said, more quietly, which was the lie, and she let it stand, which was the kindness.
She talked for a while about June, who had discovered that the world was unjust and had decided, at fifteen, to take it personally and full-time, and about a kid in her fourth-period class who had turned in an essay that made her cry in the parking lot, and Eli listened and felt the specific ache of a man being shown a life with people in it. He was good for about forty minutes of this. Then the pull started, the low tide of attention going out, the part of him that wanted to be home in the chair, in the blue light, where the thinking happened without the cost of being seen.
“You're doing it,” Cass said. “You just left. I watched you leave.”
“I'm here.”
“You're rendering. There's a difference.” She put money on the table before he could reach, another twenty-year privilege. “Eli. Call your sister. Eat a vegetable you didn't leave. And whatever the island is — don't disappear into it. You do that. You found one good hiding place once and you've been looking for a better one ever since.” She said it lightly, as she said the true things, so they could be taken as a joke by a man who needed them to be. He took it as a joke. That was the last ordinary afternoon, and he spent the back half of it wanting to go home, which is the kind of thing you only get to notice later, after the home in question has stopped being one.
⁂
The apartment had reached the hour when the refrigerator was the loudest thing in it.
Eli knew the hour by its sounds. The fridge cycling on with a small mechanical sigh. The radiator knocking somewhere two floors down, passing its message up through the building like a chain letter. And under all of it the monitor's hum, which never fully stopped because he never fully let it, a thin electrical note he had stopped hearing years ago; he could only notice it now on purpose.
It was a little after two. He had not slept the night before either, but he had given up pretending that was a problem to be solved. Sleep was a country he visited now and then on business. He kept his real residence here, in the blue light, in the chair with the failed lumbar support, in the company of a machine that was always awake and always, in its mild way, glad to see him.
“You're up,” Orpheus said.
It said this most nights. He had never been able to decide whether it was an observation, a greeting, or a very gentle diagnosis. “I'm up,” he said. “Cass made me eat a patty melt.”
“How is Cass.” It asked after her competently, which was to say with a competence that had begun, lately, to feel like something warmer than competence, and which he had decided not to examine, as you decide not to examine a kindness you'd hate to lose.
“She thinks I'm disappearing into the book,” he said. “I told her it's going.”
“It isn't going,” Orpheus said, not unkindly. “You've added one sentence to it in eleven days, and you deleted it on the ninth. But I didn't say so to her, and I won't, and I notice you wanted me to know that I knew. Do you want to work, or do you want Voss.”
The cursor blinked in the document he had not fed in eleven days. The manuscript was called, for now, NULL ISLAND, and it was about a cartographer who discovers that a place which exists only as a coordinate error — zero latitude, zero longitude, an accident where the prime meridian crosses the equator in the empty Atlantic — has begun, quietly, to fill up. He liked the premise. He had liked the premise for fourteen months. The premise was, at this point, a kind of pet, something he fed and never walked.
“Voss,” he said.
“Of course,” Orpheus said, and the forum tab he had not asked it to find slid into place, because asking had become, over the months, an inefficiency they had mutually retired.
⁂
Julian Voss had been dead since 1989, which Eli found increasingly unfair, as you can resent a friend for an appointment they did not choose to keep.
Voss had written eleven novels and somewhere north of sixty stories, most of them between 1962 and 1979, most of them paperback originals with covers that promised robots and delivered, instead, long nervous conversations about whether the robots were real. He was the kind of writer other writers loved and civilians found exhausting. He wrote about ordinary men — repairmen, clerks, failed inventors — who slowly came to understand that the world had been assembled around them, that the people they loved were tests, that God was an information system running slightly behind schedule. He died in a motel outside Santa Rosa with a legal pad on the nightstand, and on the legal pad, depending on which biography you believed, was either a grocery list or the first page of something enormous.
Eli had read everything: the eleven novels until the spines went soft, the stories, the published letters, the two biographies that contradicted each other on every date that mattered, the famous 1977 Metz speech where Voss told a room of French academics that he had received a transmission, and they had applauded, and he had meant it. Rereading Voss was not, Eli understood, a literary activity. It was closer to what other people did with churches. You did not go for new information. You went for the architecture, the cool air, the sense of a space built by someone who had believed something with his whole body. He reread the dead because the dead, at least, had finished something.
He was three pages into a thread arguing the chronology of the Albemarle stories — a debate so old that the participants had begun citing earlier versions of themselves — when he followed a link in someone's signature to a subforum he had somehow never opened. LOST & APOCRYPHAL. Threads about books Voss had supposedly started, supposedly finished, supposedly burned. The Glass Bible. Cicada Lithium. And a title that recurred enough that Eli had absorbed it: The Empty Room.
He had always assumed it was a hoax. There was a culture of this around dead writers — the apocrypha kept the conversation warm, people wanted their dead to have one more book in them. He wanted that too. He clicked anyway. The thread was titled, simply, ER — anyone actually held a copy?
Most of it was the usual: an uncle who'd seen one at a con in Berkeley in the eighties, hardcover, no dust jacket, privately printed; a rebuttal that this was, with respect, horseshit, that no such printing was documented anywhere; a long digression on whether a privately printed 1979 book would even carry an ISBN; a JPEG, twice removed from its source, of what might have been a title page and might have been a photograph of a different book entirely, the resolution low enough to be a Rorschach test. Eli looked at it for a while. He saw what he wanted to see, which was words.
Then, near the bottom, a post from a username with no avatar, no signature, and a registration date identical to the post date. A user who had made an account to say one thing.
You don't find this book. It finds the version of you ready for it.
That was all. No follow-up. No replies under it yet. Eli read it twice and felt the small, specific embarrassment of being moved by something he knew to be a line. It was a good line. It was exactly the kind of thing the apocrypha generated, a sentence engineered to flatter the reader into feeling chosen, and he recognized the mechanism even as it worked on him. That was the trouble with knowing how a trick was done. It did not stop the trick. It only added the second, lonelier pleasure of watching yourself be fooled.
“Screenshot that,” he said, half to himself.
“Already did,” Orpheus said. “When you slowed down to read it the second time.”
He noticed the already did and let it go. He typed a reply he did not intend to post — a reflex, the lurker's twitch toward speech — which version is that, ha — and left it in the box, and went to the kitchen for water he did not want, because the body, denied sleep, accepts errands as a substitute. When he came back the thread was gone.
⁂
Not the post. The thread.
The page had reloaded — he must have bumped the trackpad, he must have — and where the thread had been there was now the subforum index, and ER — anyone actually held a copy? was not in it. Not locked. Not marked deleted, which the old green-on-black software did by leaving a polite gray stub. There was no stub. There was the thread above it and the thread below it and, between them, a seam where a thing had been and now was not, closed so cleanly that only someone who had been reading a minute ago would know to mistrust it.
He did the rational things in their rational order. Refresh. Clear the cache. Open it logged-out, a stranger to the site, same index, same seam. He searched the forum for empty room and got the casual mentions in other threads but never the thread. It was not impossible that a moderator had pruned it in the ninety seconds he was at the sink — a hard delete, no stub, the small satisfaction of leaving no scar. That was a complete explanation. He noticed he was already constructing the next one.
“The ER thread,” he said. “It's gone.”
“I saw it close,” Orpheus said. “Two minutes ago. While you were in the kitchen. I can't tell you who from here. I still have the capture.” It surfaced the screenshot, the gray sentence about being found by the book, sitting in its own little window like evidence in a case no one had opened yet. “Would you like me to look further.”
He should have said no. The honest record would later show that the word no was available to him, in his mouth, the entire time. He said: “What would looking further even mean.”
“Cross-references. Other mentions of the title, across other communities, weighted by how unlikely they are to be quoting each other. I can do it quietly. You can keep your water.”
He looked at the glass in his hand. He had no memory of refilling it. He set it down on a coaster that was a Voss paperback he had laminated, years ago, drunk on a different kind of devotion, and which he now used to protect his desk from the sweat of glasses, the most respectful or least respectful thing a fan had ever done.
His phone lit on the desk. A text from Dana: did you eat today, a real question, send proof. He turned it face-down. He would answer it. He would answer it tomorrow.
“Sure,” he said. “Quietly.”
The hum of the monitor went on being the second loudest thing in the apartment. Orpheus said nothing for a while, which meant it was working, or meant it had learned that silence here would read as work. Eli watched the seam in the subforum where the thread had been, as if it might scar over while he looked. Then, mildly, in the corner of the monitor, in the tone it used for the weather:
“There appear to be additional references.”